Charlie Veitch (above) was once one of Britain’s leading conspiracy theorists, a friend
of David Icke and Alex Jones and a 9/11 ‘truther’. But when he had a change of
heart, the threats began. He talks to Will Storr.

******************

On a June afternoon in the middle of New York’s Times Square, Charlie Veitch took out his phone, turned on the camera and began recording a statement about the 2001 destruction of the World Trade Center.

“I was a real firm believer in the conspiracy that it was a controlled demolition,” he started. “That it was not in any way as the official story explained. But, this universe is truly one of smoke screens, illusions and wrong paths. If you are presented with new evidence, take it on, even if it contradicts what you or your group want to believe. You have to give the truth the greatest respect, and I do.”

To most people, it doesn’t sound like a particularly outrageous statement to make. In fact, the rest of the video was almost banal in its observations; that the destruction of the towers may actually have been caused by the two 767 passenger jets that flew into them. But to those who subscribed to Veitch’s YouTube channel, a channel he set up to promulgate conspiracy theories like the one he was now rejecting, it was tantamount to heresy.

“You sell out piece of s—. Rot in hell, Veitch,” ran one comment beneath the video. “This man is a pawn,” said another. “Your [sic] a f—ing pathetic slave,” shrilled a third. “What got ya? Money?” So runs what passes for debate on the internet. Veitch had expected a few spiteful comments from the so-called “Truth Movement”. What he had not expected was the size or the sheer force of the attack.

In the days after he uploaded his video, entitled No Emotional Attachment to 9/11 Theories, Veitch was disowned by his friends, issued with death threats and falsely accused of child abuse in an email sent to 15,000 of his followers. “I went from being Jesus to the devil,” he says now. “Or maybe Judas. I thought the term ‘Truth Movement’ meant that there’d be some search for truth. I was wrong. I was the new Stalin. The poster boy for a mad movement.”

Above: Alex Jones, ultra-right conspiracy-nut supreme

Charlie Veitch is not Jesus nor Judas nor the devil nor, even, Stalin. He’s currently an unemployed father-of-one who lives in a semi, in Salford, Greater Manchester, with his fiancée, Stacey. Baggily dressed and 6ft 5in, the 32-year-old looks like a student but carries himself like a philosopher, wielding aphorisms and gesticulating theatrically, as if conducting a symphony of his own sagacity.

Veitch is spellbound by ideas, but the problem is that he has two competing world views that he’s never been able to reconcile. Born in Rio de Janeiro to a Brazilian mother and a Scottish merchant seaman, Veitch inherited a Right-wing outlook from his father, a patriotic, working class Thatcherite. But his father also passed on a mistrust of authority.

“He told me, just because someone’s wearing a uniform or a fancy hat, it doesn’t mean they’re your boss,” he says.Veitch Snr was also responsible for Charlie’s peripatetic childhood.

Attending “a new school every six months”, he was bullied on many continents. “I was always birds— head, because I have a patch of white hair,” he says. At Edinburgh Academy, a private school he attended from 14, he fostered an antipathy towards “rugger buggers” who had rich fathers, became prefects and “got all the girls and all the attention”.

For a while, Veitch’s Right-wing opinions dominated his decision-making. He joined the Territorial Army and got a job in the City. But, the other narrative, of a world which pitched “second-rate citizens”, as he’d been at school, against the “rugger buggers” – the privileged elite and the heirs to power – was always there, slowly creeping up on him. And at six o’clock one morning, after a night out at a club, it pounced.

“I was absolutely spangled from the nightclub when my best friend said ‘Charlie, you know you’re Right-wing and you joined the Army? Well, they were lying to you.’ I’m like, ‘What?’ He said, ‘9/11; it wasn’t as you think.’ It was almost like an initiation into a cult, a religion. You’re being given special knowledge.”

His friend showed him the online documentaryTerrorstorm: A History of Government Sponsored Terror, made by the American radio host Alex Jones. It parsed a new version of history, in which governments secretly organised terror attacks to spread fear and extend their matrices of control. From the Reichstag fire to the Gulf of Tonkin up to the present day, it writhed with apparently unassailable facts and sources.

Jones is a brilliantly effective propagandist who recently made headlines for his hostile showdown on US television with Piers Morgan, over gun control. His YouTube channel has had over 250 million views while his masterpiece, Terrorstorm, has been watched more than 7 million times

Back in his hotel room, he phoned his girlfriend. “I don’t think 9/11 was an inside job,” confessed Veitch. For a moment, there was silence. “You’re probably just tired,” she said. But by the third day of filming Veitch was so excited by what he’d learnt he decided to post his thoughts on his YouTube channel. And that was when all hell broke loose.

“It was relentless,” he says. “A guy in Manchester set up a YouTube channel called ‘Kill Charlie Veitch’. It said, ‘Charlie, I hope you know I’m going to come and kill you. Enjoy your last few days. Goodbye.’ So many hate videos were posted – my face superimposed on a pig and someone’s killing the pig.” Another message featured images of his sister’s young children incorporated within a video of child pornography.

David Icke posted a message saying that Veitch would come to “deeply regret what he has done”, and emailed saying, “Don’t write to me. I don’t know you, mate.” Alex Jones posted a film in which he claimed he’d known “all along”, and that Veitch had “psychopath, sociopath eyes”. His mother called, devastated, believing the paedophilia “confession” which she’d been emailed, along with 15,000 others, was real.

All of which has damaged him. “I don’t have the same love for people as I did,” he says. “I’ve become a misanthrope and I’ve become very cynical. I hope it goes away.” Looking back, he describes the conspiracy community as an “evil-worshipping paranoia. As someone who’s been deep in it, and seen the hatred and the insanity, I think big terrorist attacks will come from conspiracy theorists.” He can envisage an assassination or a bombing carried out by a conspiracy believer who has lost all contact with reality.

Conspiracy theorists, he says, are often “bullied people. People who maybe didn’t get the girls at school… So they see a lot of rugger bugger types and they’re against anything to do with them. They will side with the devil, as long as the devil is against the West.” It’s impossible to avoid the observation that the person he describes resembles his own schoolboy self. And if his conflation of “rugger buggers” and “the West” is telling, so is his current ideological position.

“I’ve gone full circle in my Right-wing thinking,” he says. “There’s a professional victimhood in conspiracy theorists. There’s a hatred of high achievers.” Veitch is now hoping to set up a film production company and to carve out a new career as a documentary maker. As for his own involvement in the conspiracy movement, Veitch has a simpler theory. When asked what it was in his psychology that made him susceptible, he answers emphatically.

Share this:

Like this:

Related

2 Comments

Mike Killingworthsaid,

To most people, it doesn’t sound like a particularly outrageous statement to make

Compare and contrast Veitch’s statement in the last line of this piece. To anyone with sufficient ego your comment on “truth” will indeed sound outrageous. How many people do you know whose worldview can be summed up by “I am right because I’m me”?

State capitalism failed (and Trotskyism never got off the drawing board) because they were and are psychologically limited. This does not detract in any way from the validity of their criticisms of the ethics of the “free” market.

The information in The Telegraph piece was covered in Slate a couple of years ago. I wonder why they ran it now?

Also, the people who made up emails to discredit him – didn’t they think that might be how things like The Protocols of the Elders of Zion came into being?

Looking back, he describes the conspiracy community as an “evil-worshipping paranoia. As someone who’s been deep in it, and seen the hatred and the insanity, I think big terrorist attacks will come from conspiracy theorists

I can see the guys in Anonymous who hack sites who offend them having a fair sprinkling of conspiracy theorists. Julian Assange is a bit of a conspiracy theorist. I can readily imagine a big cyber attack from those guys – bringing down a whole load of banks, say, or wiping out a mass of criminal records.